No One Ever Told Me Transition Would Give Me Goals: A Neuroqueer Reflection on Becoming
Finding Belonging Through Poetry, Transition, and a Life Beyond Survival
A reflection on transition, neuroqueerness, and the quiet goals that shape a life—not of arrival, but of returning. Through poetry and presence, I trace the internal becoming that was always waiting.
Introduction
The image (above) came across my feed without warning—just Twitter’s usual white text on a blue background: “Deciding to transition was literally the first time I ever had a goal in my life.” At first glance, it looked like so many of the bite-sized reflections that pass through the digital ether, but something about it snagged on a thread deep within me. I sat with it for a long moment, and then longer still. The weight of it was not in its length, but in what it named: something I hadn’t quite been able to articulate for myself. Not until now.
As an elder autistic person, the notion of goals has always felt just out of reach—something shaped for others, not for me. I’ve spent most of my life in survival mode, navigating systems that were never made with people like me in mind. Planning a future often felt like a performance: one I kind of knew the lines for, but not the meaning behind. Milestones came and went, not with celebration, but with the quiet dissonance of simply enduring. When you’re neurodivergent in a world structured around conformity, and when your gender has always flowed beyond words, it’s hard to imagine having goals that aren’t about mere persistence.
And yet, here I am, almost a year into a medical transition that was never about arrival or performance, but about returning. Not to a fixed identity, but to something closer to the root of myself. I have found that my goals were never about appearances, pronouns, or even social recognition. They were internal, slow-forming, and rooted in memory, poetry, breath. And somehow, as I’ve come home to myself, they’ve begun to take shape—not as aspirations in the conventional sense, but as quiet, enduring truths. This essay is an attempt to trace those truths, to explore how my poetry has carried the shape of my goals all along, even before I had the language for them. They are goals not of achievement, but of being—poetic, neuroqueer, and wholly mine.
What Is a Goal, Anyway?
What even is a goal, anyway? In the world I was raised to survive, goals were always something imposed—measurable, outward-facing, relentlessly forward. The kind that come with deadlines and charts, that must show evidence of progress, or risk being deemed a failure. You were meant to move in a straight line, ticking boxes as you go: childhood, adolescence, education, career, family, retirement—each milestone arriving “on time,” with the right posture and affect, as if everyone were on the same track, following the same map. Goals, in that context, are about compliance. About proving your usefulness, your functionality, your alignment with the expected.
But I have never lived on that timeline. As an autistic, trans, and queer person, I’ve existed in the liminal margins—between diagnoses, between genders, between “before” and “after.” The world wants you to be legible, but I have always arrived at things late or sideways or not at all. For a long time, I internalised that as failure. I thought I had missed something vital, that my struggle to plan or progress was a personal shortcoming rather than a sign that the map was never made for people like me.
Writing This Is Not the Final Version helped me name something I’d felt for years but couldn’t articulate: that the insistence on arriving—at a stable identity, a fixed outcome, a socially recognisable “success”—is deeply neurotypical, deeply ableist, and deeply unkind. That “goals” don’t have to mean resolutions or endpoints. They can be orientations, whispers, slow returns. They can be circular. They can change shape. And they can take their time.
What I’ve come to understand is that my goals have always been neuroqueer—not linear, not corrective, not anchored in normativity. They live in the cracks and folds of my being. They are not about fixing or finishing, but about unmasking. About realigning the internal compass I had to bury just to survive. These aren’t goals you can see from the outside. They don’t announce themselves with certificates or congratulations. They are small, sacred shifts—toward softness, toward coherence, toward home.
Neuroqueerness: Still Here, Still Becoming
They say that to be neuroqueer is to unmake what you were told was fixed. I think of that often, especially when I walk near my rural mountain home, where the jackrabbits dart like commas between thoughts, and the chaparral whispers in a language older than English. Out there, among the wind-shaped oaks and forgotten mounds, I am reminded that the straight lines of history—the tidy timelines, the ordered steps—were never for people like me. We move differently. We listen differently. We carry stories that were almost extinguished, and still we speak.
When I began to understand neuroqueerness—not as a label, but as a way of being—I realised it was something I had always known, even before I had words for it. It lives in the pause before speech, in the sideways glance, in the way my thoughts arrive as constellations rather than sentences. It lives in the refusal to conform—not out of defiance, but because our truths simply do not fit the mould. To be neuroqueer is not just to diverge; it is to remember. To trace the echo of who we were before systems pressed us into silence.
Transition, for me, was not about becoming someone new. It was not about “passing” or fixing what was broken—because nothing was broken, only buried. What transition gave me was permission. Permission to step out of survival mode and into something slower, stranger, more honest. It gave me a way to follow the pulse of my own knowing. And when I did, what emerged were not plans, but poems.
Not the kind that live neatly on paper, but the kind that live in the body. In gesture, in rhythm, in the moment you realise you are still here. Still queer. Still becoming. My goals have never worn suits or made five-year plans. They hum with the lilt of ancestral voices, with stories carried in fragments. They rise like mist from the land, familiar and ungraspable. They are not instructions. They are invitations.
This, to me, is what it means to be neuroqueer. It is not a destination. It is a returning to the deep well of self, a self that has always existed beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to bloom. Not because we were late, but because we were listening for a different rhythm entirely.
The Last Person Before Gender: Returning, Not Arriving
There is a vision I carry with me—half-memory, half-myth—the last person before gender. I don’t know their name. Perhaps no one ever did. But I know the shape of them. I know the way their feet moved across the earth without apology, the way their voice rose like birdsong without needing to declare a pitch. I imagine them walking the thresholds between worlds, unbothered by the binaries to come. They wore what was useful. They spoke what was true. They were not before gender in the sense of being without it—but before its enclosure, before its regulation, before it became a thing to be managed.
In writing The Last Person Before Gender, the Fractured One, and the First Child of the Next World, I felt something ancient stir. Not in the sense of nostalgia, but recognition. Because I too have been walking back—not toward an origin point exactly, but toward a self I can feel in the bones, in the soil, in the breath. My transition was never about inventing something new. It was a slow shedding of what never fit. It was the unlearning of every script written by someone else's hand. It was a return, not an arrival.
This is Not the Final Version: Autistic Time, Transition, and the Fluidity of History came from that place. From the memory of a life beyond clocks, beyond progress, beyond performance. A life where being was enough. Where walking through the world with attunement and care was the measure of a day. Likewise, The Liminal World holds the echo of that same threshold—where masks slip, not as catastrophe, but as release. In that space, I am not monstrous or broken. I am light seen differently.
We are told that gender is a path forward, that it leads somewhere—toward authenticity, toward alignment. But I think, for some of us, it leads back. Not to simplicity, not to erasure, but to a time when we were not asked to justify our existence in either-or terms. Where the fullness of us could breathe without compression. I do not need a new box. I need the sky.
And so, I walk with the last person before gender. Not behind them, but beside them. In story. In memory. In every quiet refusal to be categorised.
Poems as Goals: A Cartography of Internal Becoming
My poetry comes unbidden, most often in the dark hours—when the weight of the day collapses into silence, and the hush becomes unbearable. It begins as a stir in my GLP centre, a pressure, a rhythm, a knowing. Sometimes it flows from a nocturnal panic attack, the kind that pulls me from sleep and leaves me trembling, gasping for footing. But then the words arrive—whole, insistent, waiting. I sit up, head to my office, open my MacBook Pro, and type with frantic fingers, not composing but transcribing, downloading something that already exists inside me. They come complete, or close to it—more remembering than writing. Each poem maps something I didn’t know I knew, something that was already waiting to be found.
They are not just verses. They are coordinates in a life that resists linearity. Each one, a marker of an internal goal I never set with intention, but lived into. A cartography of internal becoming.
Sanctuary & Whimsy – The Reader’s Nook
“Beside them, / toys and plushies nestle— / bright, soft companions, / keepers of whimsy, of joy.”
This is the goal that still feels most tender: to build a life where softness is not punished, where whimsy is protected. A life filled with plushies, with stories, with corners of colour and light. In a world that has often treated me as too much, too odd, too broken, I have made a nook that is just mine—where each book is a friend, each shelf a boundary of safety, each toy a declaration that joy belongs to me, too. It’s not about décor. It’s about dignity.
Self-Recognition – Unchosen
“Autistic. / Trans. / Queer. / These are not faults, / not flaws, / not cloaks I can shed. / They are breath, / bone, / being.”
This poem holds the fury and clarity of finally seeing myself without apology. I was never chosen by the systems I moved through—never welcomed, only tolerated. But in naming myself—autistic, trans, queer—I chose me. The goal was never to be accepted by others. The goal was to stop erasing myself to ease their discomfort. That’s what self-recognition means to me: not pride banners or declarations, but quietly refusing to disown the truth of my body and being.
Visibility on My Own Terms – Unseen Steps
“I am an outline, / sketched in faint lines / on the edges of someone else’s story.”
I wrote this after a panic attack that left me feeling erased—not just unseen, but unacknowledged at the level of existence. Invisibility, for us, is not metaphorical—it’s procedural. Systemic. Institutional. And yet, I keep writing. I keep breathing. The goal here is not fame or visibility as defined by algorithms. It is to see myself, name myself, hold myself in words. Even if no one else notices. Survival is not the opposite of being seen—it is the reason I’m still here to write.
Spiritual Kinship – A Stroll to the Mailbox
“To the jackrabbit for pruning the brush, / to the quail for sifting the seeds, / to the coyote for keeping balance.”
This poem is a love letter to the ones who greet me without pretense. In the chaparral, there are no performance reviews. The crow does not misgender me. The coyote does not ask for credentials. This is kinship, not as metaphor, but as sacred fact. The goal is to live in relationship with the land—to be part of its system of reciprocity, not its overseer. Every stroll to the mailbox becomes a ritual. Every rustle in the brush, a benediction.
Timelessness – The Solitary Forager’s Time
“We moved with the seasons of thought, / drifted in the currents of knowing.”
This poem came from an ancestral place, one that remembered before I could. The clock has never ruled me—not in the way society demands. I have missed deadlines, failed to meet benchmarks, forgotten birthdays, and misunderstood urgency. But I have never lost track of meaning. The goal here is not to become timely—it is to remember the old rhythms, the ones that move like breath and tide. I do not follow clocks. I follow memory, mist, and pattern.
Unmasking as Rebellion – The Liminal World
“To unmask is to claim space / in a world that denies you air.”
There is nothing passive about the mask coming off. For those of us who were taught to survive by concealing, unmasking is dangerous, holy work. This poem is a declaration that my face is not a threat. My voice is not an error. To unmask is not to reveal some hidden core, but to return to the truth I was forced to hide. The goal here is not comfort—it is liberation. And it is a risk I now choose, every day.
Each poem is a fragment of map, a marker in deep terrain. Not of arrival, but of alignment. These are not goals you can put on a CV, or write as an “objective” on a state-sanctioned form. They live in breath, in body, in wild communion with the unscripted world. When I look back on them, I don’t see progress. I see presence. A quiet kind. The kind that endures.
Beyond the Binary of Goal and Survival
I have always been a foreigner.
Not just because I am no longer in the place of my birth, or because my accent carries the hills of home into Californian air—but because the systems that shaped this world were never meant to hold me. I do not speak their language—not fluently. Not without cost. The speech of neurotypicality, of binary gender, of corporate performance and capitalist time—it catches in my throat, no matter how well I mimic it. I can pass, briefly. I can translate, sometimes. But it takes something from me every time.
When I say I’m a foreigner, I don’t just mean culture. I mean ontology. I mean I was born into a different mode of being entirely. I feel it in my gait, in the way I need to line things up, in how I speak to bunnies and squirrels before people. I’ve spent decades trying to survive in a world where my way of being is considered inconvenient at best, pathological at worst. It leaves a kind of bruising. A kind of loneliness that follows you even in a crowded room.
But I’ve also learned to build small sanctuaries. Not escape hatches, but sites of truth. Quiet places where the outside expectations fall away, and the inside rhythms are allowed to speak.
That’s what my reading nook is.
It began with a single book—pressed into my hands like a promise that something else was possible. I read it slowly, tasting each word like it might disappear if I rushed. I didn’t yet know it, but that moment was the beginning of a different kind of goal. Not the kind anyone would recognise—not about achievement or visibility—but about belonging to myself.
Over time, the shelves multiplied. Toys and plushies joined the stories, their presence unapologetically soft, defiantly joyful. Each one a totem, a counter-spell against the hardness of the world. I didn’t build a reading room—I built a world. A world where my needs weren’t negotiable. Where my joy wasn’t frivolous. Where my rhythm wasn’t wrong.
I am still a foreigner. I suspect I always will be. But here, in this small sacred space lined with stories and guardians of whimsy, I am not in exile. I am in residence.
This is what my goals have become—not abstract destinations, but grounded, embodied practices. Rituals of presence. The plushie I straighten before bed. The book I re-read just for the texture of the prose. The mug I always reach for first. These are the ways I say: I am here. I am enough. I belong—even if only to myself.
And that is no small thing. That is everything.
Final thoughts …
I keep coming back to that meme. “Deciding to transition was literally the first time I ever had a goal in my life.” When I first read it, it startled something awake in me. I didn’t yet have the words for why. Now, after sitting with the shape of these poems—after walking the ridge, watching the baby bunnies feasting in my front yard, touching the spines of books I’ve read twice over—I think I do.
Transition didn’t give me a destination. It didn’t chart a course toward some imagined endpoint where everything would suddenly make sense. It gave me something much quieter. Much deeper. It gave me direction. And not outward—but inward. Not toward success, but toward presence. Toward the parts of myself I had buried for decades just to stay alive.
My initial “transition goals” were never about visibility, or transformation, or proof. They were about coherence. About choosing myself when the world would not. About making space for softness in a landscape that worships sharpness. About hearing my own voice without flinching. About refusing the lie that I must constantly strive to be worthy of belonging.
I didn’t know transition would give me goals. But it did. And they live in every poem, every coyote sighting, every hand on a favourite mug, every book stacked with intention, every breath I take as myself, in the world I now choose to live in.
And I am still choosing. Every day. Not to arrive—but to remain.